'289 directors and no stars'

A winter window on world cinema was on show in a snowy Rotterdam at the end of January, as the annual international film festival attracted a record 355,000 punters for its showcase of the best (and the most bewildering) independent movies from around the globe.

Now in its 32nd year, the festival has proved its credentials as Europe's largest showcase of low-budget, underground or just plain uncommercial film-making from six continents.

The Dutch, ever egalitarian and earnest in their quest to unearth new treasures, self-mockingly dubbed this year's event "289 directors and no stars". Which is fair, but undersells the attraction of this most democratic and adventurous of Europe's larger festivals.

All screenings are on sale on the morning of performance, with continuous day-long screenings commandeered from the city's 18 or so commercial screens. (And it's worth of a word of admiration for the quality of Rotterdam's city-centre cinemas, all with superb seating and auditoriums, and complete with funky bars and cafes.)

With a budget of more than 5m euros, and several prestigious and juicy awards on offer, the Rotterdam experience more and more becomes a must on the festival circuit - less industry than Berlin, less showbiz than Cannes, but all the more enjoyable for it.

The large amount of Dutch spoken suggested this is a national event in the cultural calendar of the Netherlands, with film fans coming in from around the country for a visit. According to the organisers, half the audiences come from Rotterdam itself, with a large proportion of the remainder made up of film professionals from around the world, including critics, festival programmers, distributors and, of course, the movie-makers themselves.

This year, as usual, saw a strong flotilla of films from Japan, South Korea and South America, although the economic crisis in Argentina saw a sharp decrease in output from 2001. Iran had several films on offer again, although by common consent no masterpiece beyond the belated Dutch premiere of Abbas Kiarostami's Ten.

Perhaps also weaker than last year was the documentary strand, although the blistering Onibus 174 from Brazil - the true story of a petty criminal from the favelas cornered into hijacking a commuter bus at gunpoint - surely deserves distribution as the perfect companion piece to the runaway hit City of God.

This year's winners of the 10,000 euro VPRO Tigers award were the Argentinian Extrano, a religious introspection by a man who has given up his vocation as a surgeon (see review below), South Korea's Jealousy Is My Middle Name ( also a prize winner in her native country for debut director Park Chan-Ok) and With Love, Lilya, a bitter-sweet Russian romantic comedy from the former actress Larisa Sadilova.

Sadly there were no prizes for Britains' Penny Woolcock - best known for her TV adaptation Macbeth on the Estate - who was in Rotterdam with two films: The Principles of Lust and The Death of Klinghoffer.

The popular prize - that voted the most enjoyable film by audiences - went to Niki Caro's Whale Rider, a "sentimental epic portrait of the contemporary lives of Maoris", scoring an impressive average of 4.63 out of five in the rip cards distributed to film goers on leaving the cinema.

Added to the Rotterdam mix were two art galleries showing experimental shorts and still photography work from film-makers at the festival, a photography museum in its own right, and the Netherlands Architecture museum (the Dutch are world-beaters at public housing architecture, as you'll notice just from walking around town) - all within a five minute walk of the compact festival centre. And with several Dutch coffeeshops a short stumble away, a long weekend in the Netherlands' second city makes for a very pleasant citybreak/film festival holiday.

Select reviews from the Rotterdam programme:

BRICK LANE Dir: Paul Makkar UK 2002 14 min If you generally give British movies a wide berth on account of their gangsta-wannabe ethos, then Brick Lane is quarter of an hour of pure torture. A rock-video tableux of two British-Asian boys stealing a car to impress a beautiful girl, this debut short feature from Paul Makkar can be forgiven "first-film-itis" - amateur acting, a poor script - but not the fact that it's only ambition appears to be to become a car advert when it grows up. With a Bollywood Pesci Goodfellas turn thrown in for free.[MT]

ONIBUS 174 Dir: Jose Padilha Brazil 2002 133min

This searing documentary of an armed siege on a Rio de Janeiro commuter bus unfolds virtually in real time: the actual four and a half hour drama was broadcast live on Brazilian TV. (And, the film suggests, was one reason the police snipers never took one of many opportunities to shoot the hostage-taker. No one wants to see half a pound of brain tissue explode on the screen, deadpans one police chief interviewee.) In fact, the footage of hostages, mainly women, collapsing in paroxyms of fear as the gunman puts a pistol repeatedly in their mouths and tells police he will start killing on the count of six, is emotional violence enough, and puts the cinema-viewer in a similar moral no-man's land as those presumably transfixed by the television images at the time. But in fact, the film goes far further into another emotional trauma - the history of the street-kid holding the gun, who witnessed his mother being stabbed to death at the age of six, never knew his father, survived a massacre of Rio's street kids at the age of 13 (another 30 survivors have since been murdered, a social worker reveals), and has been in and out of Brazil's medieval dungeon prisons. An all-engulfing documentary, with fantastic aerial photography of Rio explaining the geo-politics of the drama, this makes an essential companion-piece, and counter-weight, to the romanticised, stylised, world seen in City of God. [MT]

ONE ROOM MAN - KEVIN COYNE Dir: Boris Tomschiczek Germany 2002 28min

It's perhaps depressing that it has taken a German film student to show the world the idiosyncratic charm of British singer-songwriter Kevin Coyne, but as a snapshot of the great man - doodling on his guitar whilst dispensing home-spun Northern philosophy - this is an intriguing insight. Whilst the art-school framing (Coyne spent one night being filmed stuck in one room) is part Eraserhead, part dodgy Depeche Mode video, the eccentric humanity of the veteran singer will have you searching out his albums. [MT]

YEAR OF THE DEVIL Dir: Petr Zelenka Czech Republic 2002 88min

Is there such a thing as a Communist sense of humour, borne out of corrupt centralised planning, political repression and lashings of alcohol? Well, there's certainly a peculiar Eastern European sensibility at work with this absurdist, magic realist take on the This Is Spinal Tap genre of spoof-rockumentaries. Following the vicissitudes of a Czech folk-rock group on the road between various members' spells in a drying-out clinic (where they meet a fictional Dutch documentary-maker) the film has a melancholic, Python-esque temperament, but is uneven and oddly paced. Its sly sense of humour is trampled on by an OTT cameo from former Killing Joke singer Jaz Coleman. [MT]

KOPPS Dir: Josef Fares Sweden/Denmark 2002 90mins

A "mainstream" movie from Scandinavia - a region with little tradition of cross-over blockbusters - is always going to be a curious beast, and Josef Fares' broadbrush comedy of a small-town Swedish police station facing the axe because there's too little crime is a warm, intermittently funny parody of US cop show conventions and romantic movie cliches. Two strong character performances from Torkel Peterson and Fares Fares (the actor, not the Ken Livingstone transport policy) make for a nicely paced, sitcom level comedy, slightly unbalanced by some expensive Matrix-style special effects. [MT]

Le Chignon d'Olga Dir: Jerome Bonnell France/Belgium 2002 96mins

With Eric Rohmer now well into his eighties, that strain of French cinema focusing on unrequited love, fickle but beautiful women and long summer holidays with al fresco meals was beginning to look like a cul-de-sac, but the baton has been taken up by the 25-year old directorJerome Bonnell in this delightful, moving account of the love-lives of a father and son following the death of the mother of the family. Whilst self-evidently in the Rohmer school (although there is a piano soundtrack), this ensemble piece has a slightly more saccharine sensibilty and less Catholicism, but is a mature work far beyond the scope of more ostentatious film-makers. [MT]

The new film from the directors of Rosetta revolves, literally, around the repressed carpenter Olivier, and the young trainee he takes on from a local reform school. As with the Belgian brother's first film, the camera swoops single-mindedly around the head and face of Olivier, making for a form al of almostreligious study way beyond the hand-held antics of cinema-verite. When the carpenter begins following his young student outside of the joinery, the shadow of Marc Dutroux, the notorious Belgian paedophile and child-killer, begins to be cast over the film, only to be washed away by a finale which is as climactic as it is mundane. Not only have the Dardenne directors established a radical new vocabulary of ilm-making, The Son is a masterpiece of great originality, bordering on high art. [MT]

This American film from a Danish director puts John Turturro in the Utah mid-West, playing a mall security guard constantly examing CCTV footage which may show the killer of his wife, murdered in a mysterious underground car park. Whilst Turturro is one of the most watchable screen actors in America, he's badly miscast as a white trash minimum wage slave, whilst what starts as a paranoid conspiracy thriller harking back to the glory days of the 1970s, with Blow Up style respooling of grainy photographic images, peters out into a whole new genre, the torporific thriller, as Refn abandons the political film noir for an extended nod towards Barton Fink and Eyes Wide Shut (whose cameraman, Larry Smith, also shot this movie.) [MT]

TWO DAYS Dir: Sean McGinley USA 2003 87 mins

Can't the Clinton generation find a better way of spending 2002 than making a spoof documentary about another spoof documentary team filming a fictional failed wannabe Hollywood actor pledging to commit suicide in 48 hours? In-jokes about rival film school faculties and self-absorbed narcissism do not a satire make. Two Days is unwatchably smug, unfunny and worryingly puerile. At the screening I attended there was a 20 minute delay before the final reel - not a single member of the audience waited to see the end of the film. [MT]

FAR FROM HEAVEN Dir: Todd Haynes USA 2002 107 mins

Dennis Quaid lands the more interesting role in this 50s pastiche cum social commentary. His closet homosexual family-man struggling with his proclivities certainly provides more power, frisson and pure politics than the somewhat washed out and tame race-controversy on which the film has been marketed. Certainly, Haynes' film lacks oomph when Quaid is off-screen. Much has been made of the 1950s design schematics of the movie, but is it really saying very much about the state of racist, segregationist America in the 1950s? It seems to have a deeper take on female passivity, not necessarily confined to the Eisenhower era, whist allowing audiences a smug assumption that white racism is a cartoon-relic of a more ignorant age.

Extrano Dir: Santiago Loza Argentina 87min

This intimate, existential quest seems fairly atypical of Argentinian cinema - indeed, with its grey landscapes, commuter trains and lonely cafes it has more of an Eastern European look. Director Santiago Loza breaks the narrative frame of the film, which charts the mid-life angst of a man who has given up his career in medicine and is now living with his sister, and meeting a pregnant stranger in a bar. The mournful piano interludes looking at the Argentinian landscape add an emotional weight to the film, which builds to a finale reminiscent of, and worthy of comparison with, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue. Unhesitatingly recommended. [MT]

Gambling, Gods and LSD Dir: Peter Mettler Canada 2002 180min

Mettler's rambling meditation on life as it lived across four countries lulls the viewer into a dream-like state which his editing then disrupts from hallucinatory images to bizarre interviews, ranging from the inventor of a mechanical sex-aid chair to Swiss smackheads. While there is no shortage of highly-charged, symbolic footage, there are also longeurs and sometimes a sneak suspicion that there is little organising intelligence behind the film's structure. Perhaps a second viewing is required - a first one is certainly worthwhile. [MT]

The Decay of Fiction Dir: Pat O'Neill USA 2002 87 mins

Ignore the pretentious title; this is a fascinating, beguiling history of Hollywood told through the vechicle of the abandoned, unloved Ambassador hotel in LA - empty since 1988, scheduled for demolition in 1994, but still, somehow, hanging on. More than a thousand movies have been shot in its rooms and corridors. And so it should - the Hacienda-style hotel was home at times to both Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra, and, most eerily of all, was the scene of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy. O'Neill's camera prowls the derelict warren of bars, bedrooms and ballrooms whilst a digital overlap shows shadowy modern-day actors in period dress seemingly re-enacting scences from Hollywood film noir. What may seem a simple idea offers a compelling taste of the so-called dream factory. A sort of ghostly, documentary echo of Mulholland Drive. [MT]

This genial road movie has all the hallmarks of the now familiar Iranian cinematic style: use of non-professional actors and simple storytelling techniques, the blending of fiction and reality and occasional exposure of the mechanics of filmmaking. Whilst many of its most successful predecessors have seen the world through the eyes of children, Journey of the Grey Men focuses on a trio of bickering septuagenarians: puppeteers and musicians who drive a clapped out old chevy over old stamping grounds across Iran. It's not in the same league as Kiarostami or A Time for Drunken Horses, trading on some rather heavy-handed imagery and not always avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentality in a wistful and melancholy tale. There are a few too many shots of swirling autumn leaves and sore-eyed encounters with old cohorts "after all these years", but it has some beautiful music, consistently inventive camerawork and a gentle charm. [AK]

THE KITE Dir: Alexei Muradov Russia 2002 75min

The kite as a symbol of freedom seems a strangely unsophisticated central image for a distinctive art film, mired in the gloomy realities of the pre-perestroika Soviet Union. For most of its duration, The Kite wallows in long, static shots and a murky cinematography, establishing the grim home life of an executioner, his wife and handicapped son and his dissolute neighbour. The filmmakers were inspired by a newspaper article, which glossed over the perspective of the executioner as a real person with a family life. The job provides a regular, if meagre income, but there's hope for the father that he can raise the money for his son's operation. The son is bullied by a neighbourhood kid and dreams of flying a kite with his father. The tenderness between father and son adds warmth to a sombre film, but the combination of a ponderous style and a naïve denouement compromises any real emotional involvement. There is a thunderous ticking clock that thumps home every slowly passing second. [AK]

RUSSIAN ARK Dir: Alexander Sokurov Russia / Germany 2002 96min

Russia's most eminent contemporary director, Alexander Sokurov, and steadicam virtuoso cinematographer Tilman Buttner have created a unique spectacle with Russian Ark. It's a single, 96-minute take filmed entirely in the Hermitage Museum, the former royal palace of St Petersburg. The wheeling camera glides by walls of treasured paintings and sculptures, swoops over dancing nobles and huge crowds of extras in lush period costume. The progression from one room to the next is a leap in time, encompassing encounters with contemporary museumgoers at one moment and past inhabitants the next, from servants and soldiers to Catherine the Great and Czar Nicholas II. The narrator behind the camera is accompanied by a fellow time traveller, a cantankerous European diplomat unfamiliar with the history of the twentieth century. Undeniably impressive throughout, Russian Ark is occasionally an overly rich cinematic experience. It's a fascinating but thoroughly ostentatious film. [AK]

LOS LUNES AL SOL Dir: Fernando Leon de Aranoa Spain 2002 113min

Despite the harsh and difficult lives it depicts, Los Lunes al Sol is a warm and funny character drama about five unemployed dockers in the Spanish coastal town of Vigo. It teeters on the border of Oscar-worthy portentousness and gritty social realism, but is saved by detailed characterisation, excellent acting and above all, a consistently imaginative sense of humour. Javier Bardem plays the jovial and casually irresponsible Santa, due in court for breaking a streetlight in a protest rally. At one point he negotiates with a friend's daughter to take over a babysitting job, only to invite his mates round to raid the drinks cabinet. He gets angry reading the child the story of The Ant and the Grasshopper, because of its simplistic assessment of indolence versus diligence. Jose is less stoical, bitter about his loss of dignity and struggling to avoid the breakdown of his marriage. Lino dies his hair in the bathroom in a desperate bid to look younger for a job interview and Amador can only seem to look for a solution at the bottom of a glass.[AK]

· Matthew Tempest is Guardian Unlimited's political correspondent. Alex King is a programmer for the Leeds film festival